Smart buildings as Cyber-Physical Systems: Data-driven predictive control strategies for energy efficiency

TL;DR

This paper reviews data-driven predictive control strategies for enhancing energy efficiency in buildings, emphasizing the integration of cyber-physical systems and identifying future research directions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive survey of recent advances in predictive building control, contextualizing them within current technologies and proposing seven key research questions.

Findings

Identifies key challenges in data handling and control in smart buildings.

Highlights the importance of semantic integration for predictive control.

Proposes future research directions for energy-efficient building management.

Abstract

Due to its significant contribution to global energy usage and the associated greenhouse gas emissions, existing building stock's energy efficiency must improve. Predictive building control promises to contribute to that by increasing the efficiency of building operations. Predictive control complements other means to increase performance such as refurbishments as well as modernizations of systems. This survey reviews recent works and contextualizes these with the current state of the art of interrelated topics in data handling, building automation, distributed control, and semantics. The comprehensive overview leads to seven research questions guiding future research directions.